A contact tracing app. | AP Photo/Stephen Groves
NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration rolled out its contact tracing program to great fanfare, promising it would help ensure New York City’s re-emergence from the crush of the coronavirus.
But things didn’t go as planned and after spending a week on the defensive City Hall is now seeking to shift the perception of a lackluster program cursed by a turf war between the mayor and his health department.
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City officials this week began emphasizing different data points to present the program as a success, seeking external support from doctors and doing radio interviews to shape the narrative.
“Among our cases that complete our interview, meaning ones that we’ve asked about, whether they have contacts, 74 percent to date have shared contacts with us. In the last week alone, week three, 86 percent of our cases, people newly diagnosed with coronavirus that got through our interview gave us contacts — 86 percent,” Ted Long, the doctor overseeing the program, said during a press briefing this week.
He attributed the number to savvy hiring decisions: “More than half of our tracers are people from our hardest-hit communities across New York City,” he said. “They understand our communities and our communities therefore trust them.”
What he didn’t say was that about half of those who recently tested positive for the contagious virus did not provide information to the city’s team of contact tracers. Of the 7,584 positive cases of Covid-19 between June 1 and June 20, the tracers reached 6,248, according to data the city makes public. Of that total, 3,797 completed an interview and only 2,808 could identify at least one person with whom they came into contact.
Put another way, only half of the positive cases completed an interview.
But the city also subtracted the number of people it could not reach by phone — 1,336 — from the total to conclude that 61 percent completed interviews.
“That’s a good start, but it ultimately needs to probably be above 70 percent. Where we have even more work to do is in the quarantining and isolating,” City Council Member Mark Levine, who chairs the health committee, said in an interview.
He noted that only 63 people “arrived at [a] hotel,” according to city data. But that does not indicate whether they stayed indoors for 14 days — the recommended length of time to isolate after testing positive.
Several sources said city officials were urged to present positive information this week following negative press reports, including a front-page story in The New York Times over the weekend depicting the program as a failure.
Long told POLITICO Thursday that officials plan to shorten the contact tracers’ interview, which is now 45 minutes or more, to encourage more people to complete it. But he argued that getting contacts from 74 percent of those who do complete the interview is significant. “The make or break of the program in terms of how we set it up is whether New Yorkers trust us,” he said.
And Long said earlier this week that the city reached 97 percent of newly-diagnosed people for whom they could find phone numbers, omitting from that total the number of people who tested positive and were not reached.
“The fact that we've been able to reach 97 percent of people newly diagnosed with coronavirus that we have a phone number for shows the program is working,” Long said Monday.
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June 26, 2020 at 10:44AM
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New York City tries to shift focus from lackluster contact tracing results - POLITICO
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